Are you interested in improving the results of your next advertising or marketing campaign?
If you work at an advertising agency or digital marketing firm, or if you’re a marketing director at a large corporation, then keep reading. We’ve done some research about consumer behavior that should be of help to you. And we’ve distilled our research down into 10 secrets outlined below that can help you improve the ROI of your next advertising or digital marketing campaign.
Ready to dive in? Great, here goes:
Marketing Secret #1: People Buy for Emotional Reasons, Then Rationalize Their Purchase with Logic
Do you think people buy Rolex watches because they’re reliable? Of course not. And while some people may rationalize the purchase of a $50,000 Corvette by talking about the hydro-formed suspension or the pushrod engine technology, the real reason they’re buying the car is because of how it makes them feel. Oh, sure, there are some purchases that are based on logic, but most purchases start with an emotional intent to buy, which brings us to our next point.
Marketing Secret #2: The Path to Consumer Purchase Starts in the Right Hemisphere of the Brain
Recent studies have shown that people must engage with a product before they form an intent to purchase that product. When people engage with a product, the event is stored in short-term memory.
But if a fact or event has emotional significance, it shifts from short-term memory to long-term memory. Once it is stored in long-term memory you’ve taken the first critical step towards building a relationship with a customer, which is one of the secrets behind relationship marketing, a topic we’ll talk more about later.
Marketing Secret #3: People Lie to Researchers
Well, they don’t intentionally lie. They just say they’re going to do one thing, then behave differently. For example, studies have shown that people who want to be perceived as health-conscious will under-report their alcohol consumption in focus groups and surveys. Some of the more recent marketing research techniques are designed to overcome these barriers to truth. But overall, it takes an experienced practitioner to draw the proper conclusions from any research.
Marketing Secret #4: As Much as 95% of a Consumer’s Thinking Occurs in His or Her Subconscious Mind
This is why your brand is such a critical component of what you’re selling. What is a brand? It’s all the verbal and non-verbal components of your product or service, such as graphics, characters, logos, product names, customer interaction, etc. A well-developed brand helps your consumers feel something about your product – and helps you tap into the 95% of a consumer’s thought that happens on a subconscious level.
Marketing Secret #5: Consumers Don’t Think in Words
Brain scans indicate that the neurons in our brain responsible for conscious thought light up before there’s any activity in the parts of our brain that involve verbal language. This, too, supports the idea that people engage with a product based on how they feel, not what they say.
Marketing Secret #6: If Your Employees Can’t Explain What Makes Your Product or Service Better, What Makes You Think Your Customers Can?
Try this exercise – walk down any hallway in your office and ask five different people what your brand stands for. You’ll get five different answers. Why would someone buy a product from a company that its own employees have trouble differentiating? Increasing sales and revenue will be a difficult challenge as long as everyone in your organization can’t articulate what your brand essence and points of differentiation are.
Marketing Secret #7: Understand What it is Your Customers are Actually Buying
If you ask people what they look for in a bookstore, they’ll almost always say good selections and low prices. But if those were the only real criteria, Amazon.com would be the only bookstore. What are people really buying when they go to a bookstore? The experience of buying a book. Do they feel at home while they browse? Can they flip through a couple of books while they curl up on a sofa? Does the coffee smell good? All of those experiences are important to the success of any bookstore.
When you understand that customers aren’t buying your product as much as they’re buying the experience of your product, you’ve unlocked one of the keys to increasing sales and revenue.
Marketing Secret #8: If You Want to Increase Sales Tomorrow, You Need to Build a Relationship Today
Unfortunately, the days of running a commercial on prime time network TV to reach the vast majority of your audience are over. Today, consumers are fragmented over a broad spectrum of media some of which are virtually advertising free. If you want to encourage someone to buy your product, you need to build a relationship with him or her over the entire lifecycle of his or her involvement with your brand. Content marketing is a great way to build and grow a relationship with prospects so that you can eventually convert them into customers.
Marketing Secret #9: Most Consumers Would Be Willing to Pay a 25% Premium for their Favorite Brand Before They’d Switch to a Competitor1
Other studies have indicated if a purchaser is buying an over-the-counter medication for their child or spouse, they’ll almost always buy the name brand2. Subconsciously, the buyer believes the national brand works better, even though on a conscious level, they admit that the ingredients are the same.
Marketing Secret #10: The Longer a Prospect Engages with Your Brand, the More Likely it is They’ll Buy Your Product or Service
This blog post is a case in point. A certain percentage of the people who are reading this will email me to find out more about 60 Second Communications. Why? Because over the course of our (short) relationship together, they’ve established that 60 Second Communications represents a level of talent, brains and experience that they’d like to utilize to increase sales and revenue.
Who are we? We’re an advertising agency that creates mobile marketing, social media, digital and traditional campaigns that help companies get new customers, win repeat business or increase their marketing ROI. We have staff experience working with some of the best-known brands in the world (including Motorola, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, AT&T and CNN) and would be happy to use that experience to help you win new customers, get repeat business or increase your marketing ROI.
The Bottom Line
No matter what kind of company you work for, all businesses have one thing in common — they’re trying to get more customers to buy buy more of their products and services more frequently than they did in the past.
The 10 secrets outlined above should give you plenty to work with. And once you’ve digested those, send me an email and I’ll show you several more ways you can use consumer behavior secrets to grow your sales and revenues.
Jamie Turner is the CEO of the 60 Second Marketer and 60 Second Communications, an Atlanta-based advertising agency and digital marketing firm that works with national and international brands. He is the co-author of “How to Make Money with Social Media” and “Go Mobile” and is a popular marketing speaker at events, trade shows and corporations around the globe.
- S. M. Davis, Brand Asset Management for the 21st Century Study (Chicago: Kuczmarski & Associates, 1995).
- Gerald Zaltman, How Customers Think, (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press; 2003).
